Eugenics beliefs led to 60 years of forced sterilizations in Oregon; Social Protection board finally disbande – OregonLive

Bethenia Owens-Adair overcame a wave of hardships early in her life to earn a medical degree and become one of Oregons first practicing women doctors. She was a heroine of the states womens-rights movement as well, with one newspaper in 1906 calling her a central figure in the making of Oregon history.

In the years that followed that effusive praise, she would extend her influence into public-health policymaking.

Thats where her legacy takes a dark turn.

Owens-Adair, who died in 1926 at 86, led the charge for a state sterilization law, based on her belief in eugenics, a scientific theory about heredity that is now considered racially biased and unethical.

She produced a widely distributed campaign pamphlet that heralded her as Author of The Famous HUMAN STERILIZATION BILL of Oregon.

Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair.

Owens-Adair called human sterilization simply a remedy for degeneracy. Heredity, to my belief, is the directing force of all life. The purity of this source makes for good; impurity makes for evil.

The well-known doctor, whose life The Oregon Journal insisted was a tale of heroic courage, admitted that she faced many rebukes for her views on eugenics. She said, without acknowledging any irony, that these scoldings came from men who called on her to embrace intellectual modesty as something every woman should wear.

But she would not keep quiet on such an important issue, she declared.

More than eighteen hundred years ago we were told that The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, aye, even to the third and fourth generation, she wrote, quoting the Bible. Had we but heeded that warning, and studied the solution of the problem, we should not today require the use of jails, penitentiaries and insane asylums.

Theodore Roosevelt, seen here during his Rough Rider days, held some beliefs that tracked with eugenics thought.

Owens-Adair trumpeted the thousands of scientific men and women in the field devoting their earnest and faithful lives to the great work of elevating and purifying the race.

And there were indeed thousands.

Eugenics had been born in the late 1800s from a sloppy reading of the work of pioneering evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin, The New Yorker magazine has pointed out. It became a prevalent sloppiness.

President Theodore Roosevelt, industrialist John D. Rockefeller Jr., Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and many other prominent early 20th-century Americans embraced aspects of eugenics -- as did, later, the Nazi regime in Germany.

Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce, Roosevelt once stated.

Dr. Owens-Adair was a prolific eugenics pamphleteer.

Eugenics had the makings of science, but it truly thrived in the political realm. The natural expression of traits could be used to justify colonialism, segregation, even low wages. It explained, some proponents said, why wealthy white Americans were successful and recent immigrants remained poor.

In the early 1900s, more than two dozen U.S. states saw significant eugenics-driven legislation. A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., upheld a states right to prevent the manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

Oregon, thanks to Owens-Adairs efforts, was one of the leaders in this push. After some setbacks, due to the states referendum system and the courts, a sterilization law passed the legislature in 1917. The bills title: To Prevent Procreation of Certain Classes in Oregon.

During the next 60 years, the state would force sterilization on more than 2,600 Oregonians.

The policy targeted the feebleminded -- with diagnoses sometimes achieved through faulty intelligence tests and the identification of supposed symptoms such as an overactive sex drive and drug addiction. Sterilizations were performed on the mentally ill, convicted criminals, people suffering from epilepsy, orphans and others.

The Oregon law established a Board of Eugenics -- comprised of the superintendents of the state correctional and psychiatric institutions, along with state Board of Health members -- which oversaw the process that could end with a person being sterilized.

After World War II, eugenics fell into disrepute -- and periodic encomiums to the late Dr. Owens-Adair began to leave out the work for which she had been best known.

In 1950, when The Oregonian produced a photo essay celebrating the foremost women in Oregon history, the caption for Owens-Adairs image said only that she learned ABCs over washboard, went on to teaching, medical degree, local fame as temperance, suffrage leader.

The birth-control proponent Margaret Sanger.

Oregons state policy that had been inspired by her now-controversial beliefs quietly continued, however.

In 1967, the Board of Eugenics was renamed the Board of Social Protection. With the name change came professionalization and expansion of the board, and as a result there were some snarls with state hospital administrators who wanted us to sort of rubber-stamp their list of people to be sterilized, longtime board member Jean Schreiber said in a 1980 interview.

Schreiber added:

Before, the superintendents of the institutions just met and agreed among themselves. The prisoners often did not even know the proceedings were taking place. For some, sterilization was a condition of release or parole, or was even used as a punitive measure for acting out.

Now, those who faced sterilization would come before the board to answer questions and offer their views on the procedure. Most of the prisoners and patients who agreed to be sterilized gave the same reason: they wanted to go home.

The increased oversight -- and changing societal attitudes -- ultimately led to a dramatic drop in state sterilization requests. The board didnt meet for more than four years in the 1970s, until a lawsuit forced it to take up a case. The last state sterilization took place in 1981; the panel disbanded two years later.

In 2002, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber publicly apologized for Oregons defunct eugenics-related practices, declaring that this official expression of remorse was the right thing to do, the just thing to do.

-- Douglas Perry

dperry@oregonian.com

@douglasmperry

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Eugenics beliefs led to 60 years of forced sterilizations in Oregon; Social Protection board finally disbande - OregonLive